SIPP Performance Comparison ...

At the beginning of September 2014, we opened a SIPP account for my wife into which she pays a nominal sum each month, gets a little tax relief added and her employer also makes a generous additional contribution.

I've been managing this pot on her behalf from the outset, and I've been relatively cautious with the choice of investments since I'm very conscious that it's not my money I'm playing with here ...

The total monthly contributions are not huge and so previously I'd let them accumulate for up to six months before buying any assets, simply to reduce the size of the percentage which was lost to trading costs.   However, more recently the broker has changed its charging structure to a monthly fee which includes a trading credit.  These credits can be rolled over for a few months before they expire, but it effectively means there are now fewer barriers to investing smaller sums more regularly.

There are currently nine separate holdings in her SIPP and they're all collective investments - no individual shares at all - some of which are conservative wealth-preservation funds (e.g. RCP.L and CLDN.L) and some much more adventurous (e.g. SSON.L that was bought at the IPO late last year).  The account is almost fully-invested with only around 2% held as cash, and the weightings of the individual funds range from 2.8% to 15.9% of the portfolio total.

Dividends have been reinvested into the same funds from which they were received, and nothing at all has been sold since the account was opened in 2014, so it's very much been a buy-and-hold approach.  Recently, new money has been used for top-ups of existing holdings rather than opening new positions.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to compare the performance of her SIPP portfolio, and its softly-softly approach, with that of my own over the past five years.

Yucca Rescue ?

After its spectacular flowering display last autumn, our largest yucca gloriosa went into a serious decline over the winter.

It was suffering from a fungal infection which shows itself as brown spots on the leaves.  It's happened several times before to a lesser degree and, although there's no cure, the infected leaves can be simply cut off leaving the unaffected ones on the plant.  

However, this time around, every single leaf was discoloured.   Previously, these infections had also started during the winter months, particularly in prolonged wet periods, but last winter and early spring had been remarkably dry.

I first thought perhaps that yucca were monocarpic, i.e. they flower only once and then die, but then I remembered I'd seen very much larger specimens in flower in the Canary Islands, and in that climate it seemed unlikely they'd reached such a size without flowering several times before.

So what to do with the plant ?  A bit of research on the internet seemed to suggest that the top of the plant could be cut off and, with a bit of luck, it may respond by producing new shoots from the side of the trunk.

So in late April, during a spell of warmer weather, this is exactly what I did, cutting the whole head off the plant and leaving a bare stump of 300 mm height.

the freshly cut stump ...

Investment Review - June 2019

Here's the combined portfolio update on the last working day of June :-

Cotoneaster Lacteus Hedge Training

To form our parallel evergreen hedge, we planted the cell-grown saplings at the start of June 2017, so this is now their third summer in the garden.

the saplings after planting in summer 2017 ...

... and in early summer 2018

For the first couple of years, we'd basically just left them to become well established, resisting the temptation to trim or thin them in any significant way. 

Left to its own devices, Cotoneaster Lacteus is of spreading & arching habit and hence very slow in gaining significant height, so by this April there was a dense tangle of low growth and it was time to start training some of it upwards to form the high hedge we want. 

Making a Garden Water Feature - Cascade

Hot on the heels of our waterwheel, we've now built another water feature to sit under the Cypress tree in the south-east corner of the rear garden.

This was an unusual project for me, in that there were no plans drawn up or even preliminary sketches - I had the idea for it one evening, made a start immediately and then everything was just built on the fly over the next few days.

We had five large stepping stones in the front garden bed, of irregular shapes, which I lifted and then hauled them around to the back.  I laid them out in a rough curve around and between some existing plants, overlapping the ends of the stones to establish the required start and finish points of the cascade.

I had some lengths of 2"x2" timber behind the shed, reclaimed from the old rabbit enclosures, and I used these plus other timber offcuts to make a simple carcass with five levels to carry the stepping stones.  I made the first drop much larger than the subsequent ones, to form a waterfall which pours onto the second stone down.   Each stone feeds the one below.  The fifth and lowest stone overflows directly into an underground sump from where it is recirculated back to the top using a pump.

The carcass tower was framed with offcuts of fence boards from our front fence build last year.  

carcass during construction

Making a Garden Water Feature - Waterwheel

This is a project that had its origins over six years ago, but I've only just completed it !  Therefore some of the first descriptions of cleaning the pump and building up a waterwheel date back to a draft post from 2013 which was never published.

My wife has always wanted a water feature in the the garden.  When we did the major landscaping works in 2013 we put a couple of old round resin sinks into the planted gravel area to be used as sumps, and although I've played around with a few ideas over the years these sumps are just too small to be effective for water features and fountains - they're very shallow and tend to empty quickly due to water loss from splashing and also the wind carrying the water outside the bowl area.

the two sumps installed in position many moons ago....

Two Islands ...

A somewhat belated post, from our now regular trips to the sun during the first few months of the year, to escape the cold and miserable weather of north-east England.

This year, we split our time away across two islands, with a three-week gap at home between.  One of the reasons for this was that last year we returned home from an extended break only to find we hadn't actually missed the worst of the cold weather, which was still to come in mid March.

So this year, we went first to Fuerteventura and then made another trip to Tenerife.

Feurteventura was quite cool at the start of the year, although there were several days of warm weather during the trip.  There were also strong north-easterly winds blowing continuously, which is supposedly one of the reasons for the name of the island.